Touchdown a primetime function on CSI: Miami was imagined to be Eva LaRue’s dream come true. What adopted was a 12-year stalking nightmare.
“Being stalked actually rewires your life,” the actress, 58, tells Yahoo. “I do not assume you’ll be able to ever return to the innocence of pondering or feeling such as you’re secure. That innocence is stolen.”
LaRue particulars the terrifying ordeal within the new Paramount+ documentary, My Nightmare Stalker: The Eva LaRue Story, out now, on which she served as government producer. The harassment started in March 2007, two years after she began taking part in Natalia Boa Vista on the CBS crime present.
Her stalker had turn into obsessed together with her years earlier throughout LaRue’s run as Dr. Maria Santos Gray on the cleaning soap opera All My Kids within the Nineteen Nineties and early 2000s. Over time, he despatched dozens of letters threatening to torture, rape and homicide her, signing them Freddy Krueger, after the horror movie killer in A Nightmare on Elm Avenue.
LaRue’s daughter, Kaya Callahan, turned a goal too, beginning at simply 5 years outdated. The stalker made related threats towards the kid, tracked down her college and even known as pretending to be her father, the All My Kids actor John Callahan, claiming he was exterior and wanted to choose her up.
LaRue, left, and her daughter, Kaya Callahan, on the premiere of My Nightmare Stalker: The Eva LaRue Story. (Jesse Grant/Getty Pictures for Paramount+)
LaRue and her daughter moved thrice after the stalker discovered their addresses. The fixed concern took a toll on each a part of their lives.
“You don’t know the place the menace is coming from,” LaRue says. “You don’t know if he’s hiding within the again seat, beneath the automotive or exterior the studio gates ready to comply with you dwelling.”
The stress manifested bodily. “I do not know methods to describe the extent of terror,” she says. “It is a full-body takeover. My eyelashes have been falling out. I had an enormous rash on my face and neck. My physique was terrified.”
The letters would subside for a number of months, and she or he’d assume, “‘Possibly he simply went away.’ Then they’d pour in once more. Even when he wasn’t writing, we didn’t really feel secure.”
The irony wasn’t misplaced on LaRue how, on CSI: Miami, she performed a DNA specialist who helped remedy circumstances in beneath an hour every week. But, “in actual life, the FBI didn’t have the know-how we have been pretending to have on the present,” she says.
LaRue performed a DNA specialist in CSI: Miami. DNA would later play a pivotal function in her real-life stalking case. (Cliff Lipson/CBS by way of Getty Pictures)
That lastly modified in 2018 when the identical FBI brokers who cracked the “Golden State Killer” case — Steve Kramer and Steve Busch — have been assigned LaRue’s case. Utilizing forensic family tree — a mixture of conventional detective work and client DNA databases like 23andMe, Ancestry and GEDmatch — they tracked down her stalker utilizing DNA left on one among his letters.In November 2019, James David Rogers from Ohio was arrested. He pleaded responsible to federal stalking expenses in April 2022 and was sentenced to 40 months in jail. LaRue was upset that the sentence wasn’t longer, and the nervousness elevated when Rogers was launched early.
Photograph illustration: Nathalie Cruz/Yahoo Information
“After stealing our peace and sanity for 12 years, he will get three and a half years,” she says. “And we get life. We get a lifetime sentence of concern.”
Initially, LaRue wasn’t certain she needed to make this documentary. She was frightened about poking the bear or inciting a copycat. Nonetheless, she moved ahead, although she says elements of the method have been excruciating.
When she first watched the documentary’s sizzle reel, “I heard his voice detailing all of the wicked and sickening issues that he had stated within the letters [for the first time]. I needed to flip it off. I wasn’t ready to listen to his voice making these precise threats.”
Throughout manufacturing, LaRue and her daughter stored their therapist’s quantity on velocity dial. Finally, LaRue says doing the documentary helped them “heal a sure a part of us that had not been healed.” The method additionally strengthened their bond: “Getting via the nervousness and the fear made us an extremely robust pair.”
Their connection deepened once more after the sudden dying of LaRue’s ex and Kaya’s father, John Callahan, in March 2020 — simply because the stalker was being dropped at justice.
“That was devastating,” LaRue says of the dying of her longtime All My Kids love curiosity, with whom she remained shut even after they divorced in 2005. “It was Kaya’s senior yr, and so many issues have been taking place. The stalker received caught, her dad handed 4 months later — through the first week of the COVID shutdown. It was a extremely unhealthy time.”
LaRue, ex-husband John Callahan and their daughter, Kaya, in 2002. (ABC/Virginia Sherwood)
LaRue describes that interval as a blur of grief, concern and survival. She provides, “We could not actually have a funeral for John. We had a Zoom funeral. It was a tough time for us, our relationship, her. I used to be barely hanging on to sanity.”
Nonetheless, LaRue holds deep affection for the years she and John shared on All My Kids, which was a golden age on the present.
“They’re my fondest recollections,” she says. “Me, John, Kelly [Ripa] and Mark [Consuelos], Sarah [Michelle] Geller, candy Sydney Penny, Michael [E.] Knight and Catherine [Hickland] — that entire crew of mates. All of us began collectively. We have been in our early 20s, and it was our faculty. We have been collectively all day. It was undoubtedly our household. We’re all nonetheless nice mates.”
LaRue compares her expertise on All My Kids to being in faculty. (ABC/Ann Limongello)
Together with Josh Duhamel, lots of them crossed over to primetime TV and movie.
“We actually received fortunate,” LaRue says. “Earlier than that, it was virtually this bizarre taboo that primetime wouldn’t rent daytime actors. Then impulsively, inside a number of years, we have been all getting picked up on primetime” — Gellar in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Ripa and Consuelos in Hope & Religion and Duhamel in Las Vegas. “We simply lucked out being in that candy spot after we all received jobs out of daytime.”
Now, with the documentary out on the planet, LaRue is concentrated on her subsequent act: growing a scripted drama primarily based on how the FBI brokers Kramer and Busch pioneered the forensics family tree know-how that solved the “Golden State Killer” case — and hers.
“I wish to inform all of the tales as they crisscross,” she says. “The way in which they did it, all of the trials and errors, the entire wild goose chases. I have already got a [show] therapy.”
For LaRue, it’s a “stunning full circle. It’s taking again the narrative,” she says. “It’s been such a therapeutic journey. I by no means thought I’d be sitting right here.”
